Essays & Columns

Out the Other Side

Best Women's Travel Writing 2008
From the moment I left it at the check-in counter at Newark International Airport, I knew my bag wasn't going to get to Tel Aviv. I kept looking back over my shoulder, blinking dumbly, as you do at something you may never see again.

Fish Out of Water

Best Women's Travel Writing 2009
I was starting to panic. Not the sudden, debilitating type of panic, but the kind that starts far away and gets closer, like hooves in the distance, a cavalry of fear approaching. I climbed the stairs behind my sisters...

Saving Grace

Whole Living Magazine
 
My best friend Bridget found religion when we were 24 and living in a rented house near Boston College, where we’d gone to school. Though she’d attended weekly masses in college, she’d considered herself vaguely Protestant; her church-going was as much habit as it was social.

Mmmmm

Coupling column,
Boston Globe magazine
I was cradling my litchi lavender martini in the lounge at Om in Harvard Square, waiting for my date to arrive. I liked this place: leather banquettes, tiny candles, New Age martinis the size of cereal bowls.

Om, Hello?

Coupling column,
Boston Globe magazine
A few weeks ago I was trolling profiles on a dating website when I came across a decent-looking guy who wanted suggestions for a good yoga class. That was a nice change, given the number of yahoos on there just looking for a girl who can touch her toes.

Hem and Haw

Coupling column,
Boston Globe magazine
In the world of dating, average may be the new hot. I'm serious. In my experience, the super-gorgeous raise suspicions (and usually confirm them). Some beauties are so bound up in their looks that they have forgotten to develop a sense of humor...

Four Eyes for Love

Coupling column,
Boston Globe magazine
Dig back into your '80s archive, and you may recall the ZZ Top video for the song "Legs." In it, a bespectacled young woman is rescued from her job at a shoe store and transformed by a troop of fishnet-clad women. She loses the glasses, feathers her hair...

Shelving Your Ego

Lola Magazine
 
Until recently, if you scanned my bookshelves, you would've found exactly what you might expect of an English major: Shakespeare, Sophocles, Elizabeth Bishop. Proud pointers to my education. Proof positive, I thought, of who I was and should be...